Hannah texted me a photo of our family this week. It is the six member version and it was taken on a Sunday before we took her to the airport. We all have morning faces, droopy clothes, and are sitting close to each other on our new sofa. I'm looking at this picture today-- flicking through my phone, fixating on my little boys draped across our laps, Truly's awkward camera face behind Paul, and Sam leaning in wearing his red "Malcolm Martin Huey" shirt. I look tired (or maybe just forty). I am smiling in a half way that is the way we smile in my family.

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How are you feeling, friends of mine? Are you worried, are you harried, are you assuming this will all pass? Are you engaging in arguments of false equivalency? Do you feel like your friends and family have become strangers to you? Do you wish you could go back to not knowing or not seeing? Do you think this is all being blown out of proportion? Are you googling the wikis for Antifa? Do you march? Do you think marching is an inconvenience?

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I have laid on the floor in my kitchen, face to the laminate, and tried to will away the suffering that I inflict on my family. What happens when White Supremacy has built your family like it has built mine? How do I fight fascists and stand in the truth, when I cannot ease the heartache of the people that I love the most? What happens when I am the author of the heartache?

Yeah... I don't know.

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We let August play football this year and he loves it and it soothes his heart to be with adults who believe in him and children that look like him. He can make the perfect French Press of Coffee. This is a gift beyond measure.

Sam learned how to hurdle in track and we joked that he PR'd every meet. His coach pushed him from believing he was not capable of jumping and running to watching him fly over these devil hurdles while we screamed from the stands. Last year was rough for him. We talk a lot about the negative effects of "peaking" in Middle School.

Manny found his voice and is growing out his hair and chooses all the Shirts About Blackness. His best friend hurt his leg on the last day of school and he hoisted him onto his back and carried him across the Sport's Day field toward the cupcake table.

Truly is starting full day school and Paul and I will miss her and worry in the same way we have worried about all of our boys, although slightly less given her eagerness to please and her Whiteness. She says impossibly funny things every day. She worries about the tantrums (her boys and mine) and puts herself to sleep singing.

The big boys are coming home in a few days and I am going to be kinder and softer and hope that we are helping and not hurting.

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Next week we will become eight again and in reality, probably much larger if we think about the ways we have chosen family or the family that has chosen us. We are, as you are, directly impacted by the policy and practice of this country and our community. You might not have sorted out how yet-- or more realistically, not had to exact a price-- but it is coming. I am trying to love this family and our sleepy faces and love my people who are like family. These people include our Black, Brown, Queer, Transgender, Refugee and Undocumented brothers and sisters and best friends and neighbors. The folks that choose to stand in the way of their happiness and their safety will have to reckon with our fury and answer for their words and actions. Figuring out what is best for the 6 or 8 or 20 people in our family photos is a tricky business but it most certainly doesn't mean staying home or staying silent-- it never has. I'm going to believe that our love is strong enough to weather this crap but I'm not going to assume it is enough.

To that end, I'm filling my life with people who hold me to what a friend calls "a high moral standard" that centers race and racism as a moral obligation for our shared humanity. I'm going to do what another friend does and "assume best intentions" when I see how harm lands in my kids' classrooms and then call it out in love. I'm not going to buy the narrative that says that comfort is divine or that preserving innocence is the best defense. I'm going to resist the urge to defend myself when I should apologize and to speak up where I should let someone else have the floor. I'm going to stare at those five other faces-- the ones I committed to first and always-- and try to do better.

A Chart! I love charts. This one is especially good if you are trying to place a certain feeling or experience into a framework or give language to a "not quite right" moment experience of racism or coded language. I find this especially helpful in naming my own shitty behavior.

I hear and read a lot of well-meaning people talk about how we are "legitimizing" the alt-right or the KKK by talking and recognizing who they are and what they are doing. Like maybe they are just children playing a dangerous game. Maybe we should ignore this as a fringe movement in hopes that they go away. But these folks are our lawyers and coaches and realtors and board members. These are class presidents and soccer moms as much as they might be felons or gang members. They are organized and focused. And they are not going anywhere.

"Costumes tell the viewer that the thing the wearer is trying to do is cultural, that it's not a political or violent attack," she says. "They suggest that the wearer is trying to convince, or engage. If you're wearing a costume, you're thinking about the viewer, you're imagining yourself in conversation with someone else. But what people fail to understand is that cultural control is a question of power." The playful outfits give the rest of us a false sense of security by tricking us into thinking the performers are acting within the liberal symbolic order. They indicate an expressive speech-act is occurring. "Costumes tell us that they're performing, that they can come back from what they're doing," Parsons says. "But why should that be reassuring? Military uniforms are costumes in the same way." Just because it's a performance doesn't mean it's not real.

What are you reading right now to help you make sense of the world or help you fight or pull you back from the brink?

I flew to South Florida to hand off the two oldest for the summer. It was hot but not so hot that I felt helpless. It was humid but not so humid that I felt stymied. J does not force me to eat on these short trips. We run errands together and she cooks and we make fun of each other. I promise to figure some things out and she promises to make the boys do homework. The boys are anxious for me to leave them to their life away from me. Their life away from us.

The smaller boys handle the transition in expected ways. They don't expect it, of course, but the rest of us brace for impact. Loss is not new and written into their bodies and their bodies respond in kind. They navigate the hits and we all get through. I am struck by how much easier 4 is than 6. I'm sure it should seem obvious to me, but it isn't.

Truly tells me all the time that she wishes she "wasn't the last one born" even though she will probably end up with the best of us-- the bits where we are too tired to object or too tired to find a reason why not or too tired to do anything but laugh. The boys and I were talking about traveling to Japan and bullet trains and all the places we could go see. They immediately think about our friend who's family is from Japan and visits often and decides that he will only go if she is going with us. I think: "we will probably never go/I wish I could take them right now".

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The house that saved us is the house that is demanding a lot of us (isn't that always the way). It gets whatever the children have not already claimed.

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This is a wonderful article about education and living in Portland and reflects a lot of our experience within this system. If you are an educator I am curious to know what you think. If you live in a place that prides itself on being progressive, same drill. My friends offers up the critique that the author centered herself heroically (as we white women are want to do) and I would say that her editor needed to be a bit more ruthless in her approach.

It's what's on the inside that counts will not heal the deaths of all of the Black and indigenous people who have died, to date, from the largest genocide in the history of the planet. It's what's on the inside that counts will not bring back Trayvon, or Emmett, or any of the millions who died in the chokehold of White power, but for God's sake, Portland, we cannot go on like this.

I’ve come to realize that people like myself—white do-gooders, to be more precise—have not been taught adequate theology for our times. My neighbors do not care if you have a robust urban missiology. They would like secure, affordable housing and good schools for their children. They have practical, tangible needs that are altogether forgotten in a capitalistic, consumeristic society where those with plenty ignore the realities of others who would never buy a latte at the new corner coffee shop. In the few spaces where the ideas of theology and urban renewal are brought together, something is missing. The overarching themes of American exceptionalism and triumphalism, tinged with colonialism, have made it nearly impossible to adequately engage with an economic and social reality as complex as gentrification.

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Canada tried to celebrate a 150th birthday last week and America rolls onward with the 4th. I am no patriot. We are going to try and build a fence tomorrow because ours is about to fall into the alley. A friend asked who all was coming for dinner and the number is pending. I've already overcooked the eggs for the salad and I'm sure we do not have enough beer. I'm hoping to yell very little (or not at all) and that these days and our shoddy attempts at/resistance to celebrating them will translate as only love.

March has been unusually cold and wet. Everything is soggy and weedy. We started on the backyard over the weekend, which meant folding tarps and removing the scrap metal. It now looks less like a squat and more like your average mess/work-in-progress. Paul took out a small dogwood The Sisters had planted in the grass. We will plant another on the street side to compensate. Our fence is staked into the ground with tent poles so that it doesn't fall into the alley. There are large dips in the grass and divots where I have been digging out ancient irises, fennel, and diseased rose bushes. The whole thing needs to be leveled. The boys leave their bikes and scooters and basketballs all over the small patch of grass. We've only been here a year and there are already plastic guys buried in the mud. I yell about it. The usual.

Our Saturdays will soon be eaten up by day long track meets.

The front yard is marginally better. The dogs regularly mark their territory on both the budding rose bushes and vigorous daffodils in the parking strip. Woe to those who decide to pick the flowers and take them home. I cut the Japonica back and cleared out its underside and Paul chopped down the early magnolia that had been planted in the middle of the bed. I am contemplating the soggy straw bed we installed last year and trying to reclaim the other three beds from the knot weed. A neighbor posted about the invasive Lesser Celandine and sure enough! There it was, disguising itself as a buttercup, trying to take hold up our front slope. I am avoiding the nurseries as much as possible. Even so, two raspberry bushes and something for the pots made it home with me two weeks ago already.

I walk by our old house four times a day and peek over the fence to see what's blooming, what their dogs have destroyed, and what is taking over. There are renters in there now (something we had hoped to avoid with the offer we accepted) and they shoved some tomatoes in the too-shady raised bed last summer. Their anemic carcasses are still poking out of the dirt. I contemplate coming back at night and digging up bits and pieces I should have taken with me. And weeding. Good, god people, just weed. It's not that hard. No matter. I bought another "Jude the Obscure" to put behind our ornamental maple. I ordered Dahlias from a catalogue and troll through the feeds of English gardeners and their wild and beautiful border gardens and think about how unreasonable and beautiful they are.

We need a fence for the front. It is not about keeping us in or out, but so I can train things up its railings. I'll be honest. I need a landscaper, too. And someone to show me how to work the watering system we still do not know how to use. Devon came over to advise me on the devil of a slope we've put everything on. She tells me the cucumbers will have to stay in buckets. She is correct, of course. I need a lot of money for most of this work.

This kind of gardening is luxury and necessity all rolled into one. I'm happier after being out there than after doing almost anything else. Truly is happy, too, and I think it is work we can do together. I drag a stump out of a friend's yard to build her a fairy house. (Should've moved the stumps from our old house with us.)

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The summers in between college semesters I worked at a small flower farm in the town where I grew up. I was responsible for: tilling the new beds, transplanting, fertilizing, weeding and eventually harvesting the flower. The owners dried most of what they grew and sold it in preserved arrangements from their property in the fall and during the holidays. I painted signs for the end rows, fed the chickens, picked up after the horse, and dutifully answered (lied about?) the questions asked by the provincial monitor who came to interview me every August so that my employers would receive my wage subsidy. I did not want a career in agriculture and I hated catching the chickens and making sure the greenhouse did not overheat. Every summer I would swear I would not have to go back out, but my college let out after everyone else and by the time I returned home all the non-dirty seasonal work was taken. While we waiting for the rows of gomphrena to come in and the nigella to go to seed, I would head out to the gravel dikes along the river to harvest hundreds of bundles of Yarrow, stripped of the leaves and tied with rubber bands. I waded into the swampy shallows on the edge of the farmland for butterfly bush and wildflowers taller than my head. I would stumble upon a tidy grow-op in the trees and snip bits of the marijuana plant to take home in a bouquet.

They would send me along with their friend's children-- kids who wanted to make a little money and who mostly complained about the heat or the rain. "This was easier than the berry picking I did when I was your age", I would say. 19 years old and already a grump.

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I ask the boys for help only occasionally. They steal my joy by turning the rakes into weapons and complaining about the dirt (when they are not throwing it at each other). 40 years old and still grumpy. Truly is covered in itchy red welts. I wonder if it's the Daphne by the front steps, as it began blooming before anything else.

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My friend Blair wrote a beautiful, beautiful book about quilting and using precious fabric. I have a lot of books about quilts and sewing (and gardens) and this is the only kind of book I'm interested in these days: the kind that is written as a love letter to the craft. Blair is a craftsperson and takes that responsibility seriously. Our stories should be woven into the things we make and we should be working to do better, whether we make for money or for love. It is no coincidence that she chose someone we both love, Stephanie Congdon-Barnes, to shoot the photos for the book. Both Blair and Stephanie understand making-as-meditation and that the practice of sewing (or whatever) satisfies something much more important than consumerism. My wedding dress turned quilt is above.

I do not know how my Gardening and Sewing and The Resistance coexist outside of trite and meaningless gestures right now. Skill-building, maybe? Definitely self-care. I do know that I am becoming much more intentional about both acts and where I spend what money we have. There are also people doing the good work of feeding people despite hardship in accessing land, loans, and opportunities: Black Owned Farms and Grocery StoresOh, and Hey Oregon: you suck at this as usual.

I didn't watch the Oscars the other night. We haven't been to a movie in ages and for once I'm itching to see so many. Storytelling has always been a popular way to deliver content, change minds, and sell crap. There are so many people making movies about hard places and beautiful things to tell stories and change minds. Sign me up to pay a sitter more than we can afford.

After all, blogging at its heart was always about telling our stories. (The selling stuff came later. It always does. Let that not diminish your stake in it though.)

But I've also been thinking a lot about how we hide behind stories hoping that their truths (however insignificant) will shield us from contemplating bigger and more diverse perspectives. Or how a story delivered in teary repose can, in a moment, unseat an opinion buoyed by years of research. I often read about discomfort being the best lever for change and I believe it. But I also believe that we throw all that discomfort into the highly emotive and empathy based story telling basket. "If we would just listen to each other's stories..." People have been telling their stories and we still have a dangerous person for a President, a bigot for an Attorney General, a relatively uneducated person for an Education secretary... We are still complicit in the bombing of far away places and we are anxious about people "stealing our jobs" and buying junk food with food stamps. So. I guess I'm wondering if story telling has run its course in the current discourse? Do we need more than stories?

So what about listening to the facts. Do facts move us?

My kids always want the facts. They care about the stories, but they are highly suspicious of them. In their world a good story is something you use to get out of trouble/bait and switch/make someone spit their water out at the dinner table. So, I've been trying to get better and dialing in the data sets so that they have something to roll out when they get told that "they are making something out of nothing" or that they only believe what they believe because of our political leanings.

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When Sam was in Kindergarten his teacher did a unit of Frida Kahlo.The kids all painted gorgeous water colour portraits that they captioned on the bottom. It's one of my favourite possessions. Sam was not yet six and yet he described the coming together and pulling apart of Diego and Frida in detail. He was fixated slightly on her physical limitations and the eventual decline in her health. He wondered how she could make art while in pain. I spoke to his teacher about it because I was kind of surprised she covered all of that. She explained that this story resonated deeply with kids in her class. Her class of five and six year-olds. The complicated romantic relationship mirrored the complicated relationships they saw in their own homes. The story of pain was familiar across socio-economic status. I tell this story frequently because I don't think it's typical Kindergarten fodder (and I also love to talk about culturally responsive educational strategies). But mostly I love this story because it illustrates the deep well of empathy our children have when presented with the facts.

Which brings me back to thinking more about Innocence Hoarding and why we do it and why I think it's so harmful for both our white kids and our kids of colour. I think we unwittingly begin this because we want to protect them from the facts and so we also shield them from the stories. Stories like Frida. Or Colonialism. Or Slavery. Or Eugenics. These are big words attached to a lot of facts but they are also attached to a lot of stories. If we get about the business of pulling out these stories for our children when they are young, they'll have the foundation to accept the facts-- and their present reality-- as they get older.

They won't be shocked by the statistics that show us that more black men and women will be incarcerated than white people who are convicted of the same crimes when they understand the basics around the 13th amendment ("If we cannot enslave them, then we must criminalize them.") They will grasp the deep inequalities of educational opportunities in our cities and rural outposts when they know about the Freedom Riders or Ruby Bridges. They won't be so quick to embrace the sports industrial complex when they know the stories behind the Negro League or Jackie Robinson.

I do not know all the stories and I have not figured out how many facts are too many. I am still circling around what I know I should do and what I have the capacity to do in this moment. The days are long and especially so when you get yourself in a cycle of fighting them. Which I do. Which I have. But it's March now (and we've gone over how this is my month) and I am fighting to revel in the promise of Spring. Spring and Facts.

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Do you have an hour to listen to three incredible Doctors? If you have trouble talking to people about the tangible effects of racism and trauma this is so worth your time. I love science because it turns the battle of the dueling stories (like the one that says "that kid was being defiant" vs "that kid was experiencing stress") on its head. Exploring the Psychological Effects of Racism is a OHSU Grand Rounds Presentation and it's both engaging and approachable. The Q&A at the end is great-- in part because it demonstrates that so often we don't even know the questions to ask. The kids and I talk a lot about their adult and kid behavior because they are often in situations with children who have trauma responses to conflict or fear or transition. Or all three. And to be really honest, they also struggle with this on a personal level. This is a great intro for people interested in Trauma Informed Care and why we need it so desperately in our schools and social service systems. (You may need to scroll down a couple to find it. The best part is that it's split screen so you get to see the slides while the Doctors are doing their presentation.)

"Over the past 40 years, the prison population has quintupled. As a consequence of disparities in arrests and sentencing, this eruption has disproportionately affected black communities. Black men are imprisoned at six times the rate of white men. In 2003, the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated that black men have a 1 in 3 chance of going to federal or state prison in their lifetimes. For some high-risk groups, the economic consequences have been staggering. According to Census data from 2014, there are more young black high school dropouts in prison than have jobs."

I am stuck because this is what I know they will ask me: Why are you not stopping this? Why are we not stopping this?

Help me. Please.

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When I was young we knew the story of Brother Andrew the Bible Smuggler by heart. He spent decades smuggling the banned books into communist countries for illegal Christians. ("But Christians can't be illegal, Woman!" Oh. You don't say.) This passed for a thriller when we were young, and why shouldn't it? This was life and death. Today, there are entire organizations who continue to do this work on a much larger scale. It's illegal. But the laws are bad. Right? Yes.They are terrible.

As I got older I learned about all the people who used cover occupations or flat out lied to become missionaries in "closed" countries. While these governments would deny a visa for a missionary, they may welcome an English teacher or a business man. It is a risky business and some of them have paid dearly for their decisions. Their calling versus willfully disobeying the laws of the countries that they set up in. But.The laws are bad. Right? Yes. Of course they are.

In fourth grade I replayed the scene in Corrie Ten Boom's biography where she flung her papers into the hidden closet and closed up all the Jewish people she was hiding in her attic over and over again in my mind. What would I do? Would I be quick enough to turn the mattresses to the cool side to fool the Nazis? Would I grab my glasses in time? Where we would we put the people in our split level BC Box House? I would shake myself out of this logistical nightmare. This would not happen. My mom asked me why I was rereading The Hiding Place over and over. She was worried that I was too preoccupied with the sections about the concentration camps. I was not. I was obsessing over what led to them.

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So that's where I'm stuck. The laws are bad and are being made worse.

"Boys, these children that you love and play with may have their parents taken from them. The government will take and sell their stuff that they worked hard for. We do not know if or when it will happen. They made a difficult decision to come here knowing that it would be hard. Some of their parents have been here since they were children and had no choice in the matter. And this is what I also know: people that you know and maybe even love are applauding this decision, voted for this decision, and will (maybe even unknowingly) pay for this decision. People in your school, on the street, and in our family thought that this would be better for you and me in the long run. They are wrong. It is okay to be angry about it. I am angry about it."

"Having papers is important and we've been trying to help_____ get them and it might not work or come in time. Or it might! We don't know. I don't know. I'm sorry that this is happening. We will hope for the best. Sometimes even when you have papers, they take them away for making mistakes. People have to be careful to be careful and you're right, it's not fair. Not even a little bit."

I will probably ask them if they need a tissue or if they have any questions. I will try to explain how hard people work to gain legal status and how hucksters determined that the best way to get their way was to incite fear with lies. We live in a nation of people inciting fear with lies. I will ask them to show extra kindness and compassion to their classmates and what it looks like to stand up to bullies. I will tell them that we will do what it takes to help, even as we do not know what kind of help people will need.

At this point I will probably be crying.

This will effectively end the conversation because I've already given them too much to think about and MOM IS CRYING.

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Is this what I tell them?

Or do I hope they will not notice?

Maybe this is the part where we test out the way of seeing in the same way that people tell me that they don't see colour.

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I was going to list some articles that outline what this new world looks like for undocumented peoples. But those are everywhere, and you all have google. Here is my takeaway: you can be deported if you are accused of a crime. You can be deported if your citizen children take advantage of things like food vouchers or free lunch. You can be deported if you report a crime/are a victim of a crime. You can be deported. And deportation looks like prison for many of our neighbors and friends-- because you are first sent to detention centers. Jails. I guess... I guess I'm just wondering how far are we going to let this go? Does your stock portfolio contain private prisons among its listings? You may be about to become rich. How nice for you. Do you think that this is a punishment that fits the crime? May the gods have mercy on your soul.

"The history of immigration policy is filled with moments like these, when a group goes from subhuman to superhuman within a few short years, because of political winds beyond their grasp. My grandfather and Korematsu were born a year apart, under different circumstances, and embodying two distinct possibilities of American life. It’s a reminder that the “Creed of Democracy” contains limits—that no amount of assimilation or integration will protect you when an alien requires conjuring; that being a model citizen means little when laws can be enforced arbitrarily, and you no longer qualify as one. Yet many of us still try to live up to such impossible standards."

Ex Neo Nazis Explain What's Driving the Alt-Right Please do not stick your head in the sand and believe that this is not what's driving so much of this. I recognized my first "Nazis-not-Nazis" in our local mall years ago. Days after, I still puzzled over the dissonance between the stereotype and what was in front of my face.

"...when I was part of the movement was to make the unreasonable sound reasonable. So you could take the Nazi ideology and use a different language to make it sound very reasonable. If you put on a shirt and a tie with a suit, and tell people to go to college, don't get tattoos, and go mainstream, it makes white supremacy appear reasonable. I did that during my time in the movement. And it's funny to see it 20 years later, and that's exactly what the whole movement looks like now."

Milo Yiannopoulas and The Church of Winning These were never really my people, but maybe they resemble those who I used to think were my people? I don't know, but either way it doesn't make a difference now. These are not my people. This is unrelated to immigration, but it goes in the same pot as far as I'm concerned.

"White evangelicals voted for Trump by a wide margin; eighty percent supported him, according to exit polls. But the election didn’t resolve the questions; a month into his presidency, Trump supporters are still defending the indefensible."

"If they try to talk to you on your own, you need to ask for another adult to be present. Or ask to call me. One of us will come straight over. Don't let them close the door."

"If they ask you what you're doing, let Sam or _____ or_____ do all the talking. Don't interrupt. Don't give them any more information. Call home immediately even if you're close by. If something bad starts happening, someone needs to start running home and you need to start yelling for adults to help. Adults will help. Scream if you have to. Just don't use your hands. Tell them my name. Ask for me."

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I asked Paul how he knew that his dad was wrong about the world. He was raised by a bigot-- how is he not one? Or, at the very least, how does he move through the world pulling himself out of line? He boiled it down to three things: attending diverse public schools, becoming fanatical about skateboarding, and listening to hardcore music. Diversity in the classroom meant exposure that contradicted his dad's worldview. Skateboarding meant he was a part of a culture that made it forcibly uncool to be racist in any way-- like, you'd get the crap beat of out of you. So, chalk that up to Peer Pressure. Hardcore and punk were similar in that way, but gave language to this pressure by way of Positive Messaging. If he was to add a fourth, it would be raising Black and White children. The fourth means we get to dig in further to the stuff that he started wrestling with as a Kindergartener.

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I was in a meeting the other day and we were discussing some of the challenges our school is facing. Poor behavior from students immediately came up as a core issue. Predictably, parents first made a statement absolving themselves from personal responsibility. "I have really high expectations for my kids. They would never even think to pull something like that." This is usually (and was in this case) followed by a statement meant to shift the blame to other caregivers and children. "I'm sure those kids have difficulties at home, but I can't imagine that anyone should be expected to put up with that. They need bigger consequences/to be taught a lesson".

The parents pointing this out are nice people with nice jobs who volunteer and march and wear pink hats.

And yet, some of the kids that they are raising with these high expectations are the same children who taunt and bully and drive those children to harm themselves and others. These kids that toe the line at home are the same kids who roll their eyes at the adults and whisper insults to their classmates under their breath. Don't get me wrong-- I believe this is all typical adolescent behavior. I don't think either type of child should be vilified. The problem becomes when the children who are seen in the first category assume powerful roles over children who are cast into the second category. This power structure starts in elementary school, follows kids through their school careers and into their Real Life Every Day Careers. This doesn't end on the playground or in the principal's office.This stuff sticks. We are literally raising our White Children to assume power over others by not interrupting common narratives around "at-risk" children (or using that phrase at all), poverty, and what White Supremacy can look like in a Lunch Lady. When we don't teach our children to think critically and behave emphatically, we are setting them up to repeat the patterns they've seen modeled.

Those kids are just bad. And they have it coming. If only someone had steered them in the right direction when they were young.

Oh, wait.

I am grateful that I'm having lots of good conversations with parents who want to do this work and model it for their children. One of the hardest things to explain to parents of our particular generation is that there is no sweet children's book, no single self-help tome, and no illustrated rubric to use to guide us or our kids through this work. Dr. Sears did not cover this stuff. Many of us were told to follow our gut when it comes to raising children, that we will know what's best for them. But man-- our guts are wrong when it comes to rooting out bias. Our guts tell us to protect ourselves and our kids at all cost, which means it is imperative to cling to the status quo. Child-centered parenting while parenting a white kid can be flat out dangerous if we do not keep this in mind. This status quo is the one that centers Whiteness as the Expert in Every Room/Theological debate/Board Meeting/Booster Club. It tells your child that the person in his Kindergarten class who has the most power is the kid that performs Whiteness the best. It's all much harder than that, and we have to think and wrestle and talk about these things in order to frame this for our kids. What I said before about modeling remains the same-- YOU HAVE TO MODEL THESE CONVERSATIONS. YOU WILL GET IT WRONG. YOU WILL TRY AGAIN.

Am I shouting? I'm shouting.

People publish really interesting and smart things on the internet for free every day. If we say we do not know where to look, then we are not looking. If you are stuck and need a book, start with Baldwin. If you only read poetry, find Clifton and Giovanni. Read How The Irish Became White. If numbers are your thing, research your district's behavior data and graduation rates. Dig into how public schools exist to serve all children. Ask yourself if kids are being served in your town? Ask yourself why? Don't settle for your own answers. Believe that Black Joy is Real, Black Excellence is Real, Black Achievement is Real, Black Wealth is Real, and make sure your kids know this to be true because they have seen it with their own eyes.

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We were trying to work through a specific social situation the other day and I explained that situations can shift when you come in numbers. When the boys are out together they come in numbers. This is Positive Peer Pressure. "Set the expectation for inclusion and kindness and if it doesn't happen you all need to walk. Pretend you're a union."

"But what if we don't WANT to leave yet".

"Unions never want to strike, Bud."

"Right. Sometimes they have to." <side eye> "I see what you did there."

****

Our children are impossibly smart and impossibly full of promise. They get it when they are given the space and language to get it. I linked to an article about "opportunity hoarding" in Evanston Public Schools. We've discussed this issue in very real terms in our parent group. I think we also make this very real choice around "innocence hoarding"-- that is (and I'm still trying to work it out)--privilege gives us the opportunity to isolate ourselves and our kids from both experiences and learning about certain experiences. You may never ever have to have a conversation with your child about what to do if they are stopped on the street and asked to show their ID because they probably never will be asked. And if they are asked what they are doing/where are they going, they most likely will not be arrested. And if they were to be arrested, they certainly wouldn't die. And so we hoard all of this innocence hoping that we will not upset our children, meanwhile we expect Black and Brown children to bear the burden of our children's naïvete.

I'm posting this because Police Brutality and Driving While Black is also very real. I cried watching it and you might too. So I watched it again. And I cried again. And I watched it one more time until I could get through it without sobbing because I owe it to my kids to be able to have these conversations frankly and without blubbering. So, let that be fair warning if you're at work. Please show this to your kids: Black Parents Talk to Their Kids about the Police

Black, Latino Two-Parent Families Have Half the Wealth of White Single Parents This is so important. It derails the myth around equating a specific kind of (perceived or real) hardship with another hardship. You can't play the Oppression Olympics when the numbers don't back you up. (If you don't like my source on this, google will give you half a dozen other places you can dig into the numbers.)

"If current economic trends continue, the average black household will need 228 years to accumulate as much wealth as their white counterparts hold today. For the average Latino family, it will take 84 years. Absent significant policy interventions, or a seismic change in the American economy, people of color will never close the gap."

"If we’re not talking with our children about how race affects a person’s life in the United States and how racism factors into that, we’re not convincing children that skin color doesn’t matter. We’re telling them to figure it out themselves."

How Today's White Middle Class Was Made Possible By Welfare I think this is an important thing to understand when we feel stuck in inter-generational conversations about race. Many, many people believe that it was just hard work and sacrifice that built wealth. But we know that this is not true. If your family benefited from the GI Bill, race played a part. If your family benefited from low interest loans and loan forgiveness, race has played a part. Etc., etc.

"Today, the federal government’s role in building and subsidizing the homestead communities—and the larger government programs to subsidize construction of white suburbs across the nation—is all but erased from history. This allows contemporary white Americans to assume they came by home ownership, and the family wealth it produces, through individual hard work. It also sustains their refusal to recognize the ways white privilege—or what W.E.B. Du Bois called “the wages of whiteness”—propelled white workers into middle-class economic stability."

My maternal grandparents spent a lifetime in Nigeria working to improve agricultural methods, caring for lepers, praying for their neighbors, and spreading the Good News. When we were cleaning out their house we had to figure out what to do with dozens of Bibles, boxes of ancient tracts, and books in languages they used to speak to each other in code. I grew up loving this exotic legacy of piety and perseverance, of colonization and enculturation. I traced the ebony heads on their mantle with my fingers and I imagined my grandma cooking over her open fire. And like most (maybe all) white missionaries to foreign places, they were the both the glorious helper and the colonizer-oppressor in a single person. Onward, Christian Soldier.

To do this work, they sent their children off in small airplanes across the country to boarding schools staffed by strangers. Some of the adults were kind. Some of them had been placed there after being pulled off of "field" assignments for indiscretions. Some of them were cruel. My mom was five when she went off to sleep in a dorm governed by severity and righteousness. There are lots of stories that she told us growing up that made me sad and still make me sad. I am amazed that she was the mother that she was and is given how little she had been mothered.

I knew that my grandparent's service had wreaked havoc on their family of six. Whoever they had intended on saving, it was their children who were left without the net. They are, in some ways, still paying the price for this sacrifice. This too, my legacy.

****

When I was young my parents traveled the world sleeping in the homes of friends, family and strangers. We traveled together with a group of young adults who played guitar, sang choruses and performed at colleges and on street corners.

I loved flying and being with my parents and the attention of the adults that traveled with them. I loved learning how to read in the back seat of a 15 passenger van. I loved meeting children and making friends and the smells and sounds of new places. My sister and I learned how to untangle microphone cords and sing duets with polyester puppets. We learned all the skits and the finer points of miming. Over time the places that we returned to became extensions of our own sense of home and family. We were aces at the wordless book-- a small flip book of colours that stood for the crucifixion and resurrection story and the way to salvation. We were polite and respectful.

When I was six, and just before my parents retired from this part of their lives, we spent several months in India staying with my "Auntie" Tara and "Uncle" Rajah and traveling by train to different parts of the country with bulky sound equipment and a collapsible puppet stage made of PVC pipe. My parents were cultural anthropologists as much as they were street preachers and they tried to participate in the life of the places they traveled to. One of my clearest memories of that time: standing in a group along the edge of a Hindu temple courtyard watching as a man brought in a baby goat to the center. I remember my dad's hand on my face as he turned it away, and I listened to the last bleat of the goat as they slit its throat. We watched the people line up to have their forehead's anointed. I saw mothers holding babies and children my age avoiding the blood on the ground as they waited for their turn. There were marigolds everywhere.

Whatever lesson I was supposed to learn from that day was most likely lost on me. I saw sacred act, surely. These people believed differently but no less fervently than I did. They clearly needed Jesus, but I was unsure if that was my job. Maybe we had washed our hands of them in that moment because they were probably too far gone.

We visited the Sadhu's as well-- these wise men and teachers who held their limbs in impossible positions meditating toward enlightenment. Their eyes were terrifying and their limbs were held up by ropes and withered to nothing. This was curious to me. And otherworldly. I have squeezed my eyes shut and thought about what else I can remember. I see Mother Teresa's Home for The Dying-- but I only see the flat roof and the funeral procession below. I feel myself trying to hide under the chair away all the people wanting to pinch my cheeks. There is more, but it is nothing exciting.I loved it all, though, and would find myself longing to go back. My sister returned for a visit in her early twenties. My auntie Tara came to visit when my boys were young. My love for her transcended the hard line she took on my growing apathy toward regular church attendance.

****

Years later I would be waiting at an intersection in Chicago as a bus pulled away from the corner. A burst of steam rolled up from the vents as I heard the red line pass underneath the street. It was hot and humid. The smell of piss, garbage, and exhaust rolled together with the fried food being sold behind me and it all made me fall back a few steps. I had never smelled or felt something so clearly tied to a time of life that I loved so much as I had in that moment. I started to cry.

****

I joined first grade at my small elementary school in the river valley half way through the year. It is the same school that my nephews and niece now attend. On the first day I thought that someone had broken my Mork and Mindy lunch box and stolen my lunch. But it was someone else's. I cried. I mostly cried because this was hard. I had attended school for a day when we stayed in a college town with friends. The principal had noticed me with my hands in my pockets during the national anthem and had walked to where I was standing and pulled them out in front of everyone. Our friends had told me to run home for lunch, so I had taken off across the field as soon as the bell rang not realizing that it was just time for PE. They brought me back. I cried after I returned to their house a second time and begged to stay home. I imagine my mom recognized the fear and frustration in my face. But now we were home and this was my school and the teacher did not understand my travel journal or my scrapbook. I knew how to read better than most of my classmates, but I did not understand that the pecking order had already been established. She insisted that I had been taught to write my "a"s incorrectly and I turned red at my perceived incompetence.

I would make friends quickly. My dad became a self-employed contractor and built us a playhouse as a replica to our actual house. We pulled it on a trailer in our small town's parade. We were surrounded by family and a community that had watched my dad grow up and supported our family while we traveled. I broke my leg on one of the last days of first grade and had to wear a hip to toe cast for most of the summer. We still lived in service to our neighbors. My parents had not sacrificed their family for their calling. More likely, their family could live in concert with their calling in ways their parents had not been allowed to. My sister and I counted it all joy. There would be more siblings.

****

I told one of my kids that I was applying for a job and he said, "but you already have one. You have lots!" And he listed off the things he sees as he moves through the week. They are "jobs" but they are unpaid. That is not true. I guess I am paid in-kind. They are meetings and hours of volunteering and turning up when I am asked. I am grateful and surprised that he sees any of it and counts it as part of my work. It is my work. My family and this way of showing up is the way that I've reconciled myself to the endless cycle of motherhood and home-keeping. I did well in school. I had potential. What is my lot now? What is my legacy?

I used to write and hit publish and then go back and fix the typos I swore I had already corrected. I am trying to be more diligent now, but I need a good editor and someone to proofread and then tell me to order my thoughts accordingly. This is an apology to my writer-ly friends who read and cringe and still read. I love you. I am trying.

I came to the United States in the mid 90s on a student visa. It expired with graduation and I decided to stay on a bit longer, working as an occasional nanny and office assistant. My friends were going on tour in the Spring and I could be Merch Girl and then I had a job (maybe?) waiting for me outside of Toronto for the summer. As a student on a Visa, the only legal employer is the institution you are attending. This is the agreement between the government and the private sector and it is a beneficial situation for everyone but the student. The college's wages were exceptionally low-- hovering just around the 4.10/hour minimum wage. There is also a limit to how many hours a student could work and of course, there are no tips or bonuses. My fellow international students coveted these on-campus jobs, but we also realized that we were getting the shaft. Our American classmates were waiting tables, valeting, and working in coffee shops. They were answering phones for ad agencies and lawyers. They had access to places we did not and wasn't it enough that we were afforded an opportunity to study in America? Our earning potential was bureaucratically cut.

It was a big city and a kid could easily work for cash and lots of students did. We were fresh faced and bound by a strict code of conduct by our college. Who wouldn't want us shuttling their kids to Hebrew school or fixing weeknight dinners? Is there such thing as being a "little bit illegal"? We worked for bank execs and house sat for philanthropists and politicians.

I have been thinking about this time as someone who is a permanent resident but not currently a citizen. What would it take for my permanent residency to become temporary? A traffic ticket? Maybe a series of them? An arrest during a civil demonstration? Perhaps an eviction? I was told that even if people are cleared of their felonies or misdemeanors that trigger deportation orders, "it will be the civil shit that gets you if you catch them on a bad day". These are within the realm of possibility in my circle, if not immediately personal. The cost of living has skyrocketed, with housing and gentrification leaping to precariously high levels every year. We are, as a family, two or three house payments away from "uh-oh" if we were to lose our ability to earn money. I'm not black so "driving while black" is not a problem I contend with, but maybe it would be by proxy during the times I stop to bear witness to law enforcement pulling over or detaining my Black and Brown neighbors. I am protected by my Whiteness, my access to my community, and my willingness to submit to respectability. I blend in. I am fine. I am probably fine.

I ended up in Ontario late that Spring, working for a rose breeder digging at the still frozen ground while renting a room from an Irish woman who loved listening to charismatic preachers and tut-tutting my late night phone calls to Paul.

****

My aunt sent me this after I asked her to help with a specific date:

Your Dad’s grandparents Katherine & Wilhelm Fehdrau came to Canada from the Ukraine in 1909. The village they lived in was a [German} Mennonite village called “New Samaria.” They travelled by sea and arrived in Montreal and then took train to Saskatchewan. While on their ocean trip your Grandmother Helen (who an infant 3 months old) became very ill and the ship crew told her Mom it would be best to throw her baby overboard and our Grandmother said, “That will not happen until I see her dead in my arms.” This was the story my Mom (your grandmother) told me. Hope this the information you wanted.

She is the keeper of the family history for my dad's side of the family. She does not let things get wishy-washy like they so often do in family histories, with truth and myth running into each other. She told me that my paternal grandfather was born in Kansas, as was his father, shortly after the family had also sailed from the Ukraine.

I have been thinking a lot about becoming a citizen and what that might mean in my family's own legacy of migration. I understand the urge that some people feel when they come to the United States to become a citizen right away so that they can fully participate in a place that they are coming to love. I do not love this country, so that would be tricky. I do not love any country. But I do feel like participation as a citizen is a primary part of the resistance.

I do not know where I will land on this. I am concerned at cutting off my own children's options. And yet I want to throw my entire weight-- systemically and physically-- against the mounting waves of anxiety and real-life threats to our neighbor's safety. Tonight, there was a rumor that ICE police were stopping busses in outer areas in our county and asking people for paperwork. We fear Islamic Extremists who storm buildings separating people out by sect or clan. I just... This is out of a dystopian movie. This cannot really be happening. It is only a rumor and yet we believe it because everything seems within the realm of possibility in this time.

It is happening.

****

I was fixated on the Holocaust as a child. Mostly, I was fixated on the idea that Germans blithely and fervently followed fascism to it's awful end. I was German! Did this mean these were my people? Well. Yes. They are all of our people:

The men and women who reportedly handcuffed small children and the elderly, separated a child from his mother and held others without food for 20 hours, are undoubtedly "ordinary" people. What I mean by that, is that these are, in normal circumstances, people who likely treat their neighbors and co-workers with kindness and do not intentionally seek to harm others. That is chilling, as it is a reminder that authoritarians have no trouble finding the people they need to carry out their acts of cruelty. They do not need special monsters; they can issue orders to otherwise unexceptional people who will carry them out dutifully.

If you are unmoved by any of this... It does not really matter how you might have thought or hoped this would all turn out, I am willing you to decide that the impact is not worth the blood you will have on your hands.

Our friend, Andrea, bought us the book Good People Everywhere by Lynea Gillen. We read it often and I hold out hope that those Good People really are Everywhere.

The church I grew up in did not sing gospel music, per se, but more contemporary types of praise music mixed in with hymns... Um, choruses? They were often performed slightly off tempo thanks an abundance of acoustic guitar and hand percussion. They'd best be compared to camp songs if you'd like the non-theistic version. So it is not that music, but the music that I heard on Sundays in college and in my dorm room (thanks to my roommate) that I find myself humming in the shower and dancing to across the living room. I started listening to gospel music again when the babies were little and we had left church-going for good and I needed the comfort that gospel music brought to my spirit--words and melodies that mixed up hope and love and folk religion all together and unapologetically.

The boys give me a lot of side eye over this.

It is deserved.

And... somewhere else inside of me wonders if these words and melodies will fill them or render some familiarity as they grow up and leave. They will be part of the "unchurched" and yet-- church-- in all its cultural significance, will be a part of who they are: showing up for their neighbors, singing, dancing, believing in the power of love to heal trauma and move us forward.

****

Someone I love reminded me of this:

There is always something to do. There are hungry people to feed, naked people to clothe, sick people to comfort and make well. And while I don't expect you to save the world I do think it's not asking too much for you to love those with whom you sleep, share the happiness of those whom you call friend, engage those among you who are visionary and remove from your life those who offer you depression, despair and disrespect.

Nikki Giovanni

****

There is a good chance that my family will be caught up in one way or another in the horror of this world of brash Executive Orders. It's a world that preys on people's fear and takes no account of the real human toll. What will you do when your neighbors do not return home from picking up their children from school? Oh. Maybe you don't have *those* kinds of neighbors. I do. But never mind. Will you notice when there's no one left to cook the food at your favourite restaurant? What happens when you can no longer find produce at the grocery store? What will give you pause? When academics are deported? Do they have to look white? Do good things? Live properly? How many parking tickets are they allowed to have? What if their children get free lunch at school?

Wait. Mine do. Should that make a difference?

****

I grew up in a river valley. The water had been drained and dammed and the now fertile farmland was parceled out by The Crown to settlers. I grew up on land stolen from the indigenous river people that was offered to those colonizers-- those refugees from Europe-- in exchange for their agricultural expertise and piousness. My grandparents worked hard. They were marginally successful. But only marginally. They owned a small dairy farm and my great grandmother lived in a back bedroom my grandpa added on for her. When my dad was a toddler, he contracted Polio. My grandpa prayed the prayer of Hannah from the Old Testament, and beseeched God to spare my dad's life. He survived, just as the barren Hannah gave birth to Samuel. When my dad announced that he was going to Bible School and then out into the world, my grandparents gave him their blessing, knowing that this was the promise they had made their God years prior.

You see, it was all "blessing": blessed with health, land, opportunity to succeed or fail, opportunity to be successful after failure. These are the stories that we get to tell ourselves when we equate the fortune of privilege with the notion of unearned blessing-- or worse: We work hard, we will always be rewarded.

My dad now works in company with his indigenous neighbors seeking to reconcile the sins of our forefathers.

Experts in the Field-- an Essay by Bonnie Nadzam. This is a brave and beautiful piece by someone I know to be the same. Her truth telling is powerful and uncomfortable. I am horrified and I am amazed and I vow to be believe people when they show me who they are.

What I really want to say is that all of these things happened to me, that none of it was okay, that I didn’t deserve any of it, and that I have nothing to be ashamed of. But the truth is it has all diminished me, silenced me, terrified me, and shamed me. We know, don’t we, that men, especially those in positions of power, try to hurt, tame and control what they fear, and cannot or will not try to understand. And we trust that women, individually and especially together, are tremendously powerful. If ever there was a time to disregard those who won’t believe our stories, now is the time to speak very plainly about the behavior of those men who assume we’ll be swept away by their poetry, or politics, before we understand what’s happened. Says James Baldwin: “The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim…she has become a threat.”

I have Mary Tyler Moore episodes on my split screen right now. You Tube, you are the devil, but sometimes you come through beautifully.

Paul bought me season 1-3 of "Rhoda" for one of our first Christmases together.

We met at a hardcore show in the basement of a Food Not Bombs building in Champaign, IL in the winter of 1999. We hung out briefly after the show at his big, gross, party house and he bagged on Canada and I bagged on the size of the semi-ironic (but not so much) wolf painting on his wall. He was intent on moving to Alaska to study wildlife and meet someone that looked like the folksinger, Jewel, and I was intent on finishing up a degree that had become burdensome. He started showing up in Chicago to my perfect one bedroom apartment in Uptown, that I shared with 1-3 roommates.

I was a total mess in the dating department. My missteps don't bear repeating to anyone but my own daughter, save to say that this was different and after a few false starts I threw myself into the whole thing with gusto. We got married in a fever.

We looked impossibly young and doughy and I do not know why we thought we had what it took to make it through. Scratch that-- we probably did not have what it took but we got it together anyway. He reminded me that we were both too stubborn to be talked out of anything. Looking at pictures from that time make me cringe. Those were good days, those were not good days.

****

He works from home in what used to be the Sisters' Chapel. His desk faces the big stained glass window. The room is long and narrow (it's the original front porch) and it is the only space with wall-to-wall carpet. We replaced the eternal flame-- a hardwired lamp with no off switch-- with an outlet. He shares the room with our beta fish, Dorito, and a second hand couch. Truly sneaks in with her book and her cardboard box "car" when he's not on the phone. The dog parks himself under his feet. He starts working before the rest of us are awake. He works part-time on the weekends as part social experiment/part bill paying mechanism.

He grew up as an only child. So, sibling dynamics are not a lived experience he gets to draw on. I did not imagine my life would be like this, but I could conceive of it. He did not imagine, could not conceive, and I think most of our friends wonder why he hasn't packed it in ages ago over all of this. "Packing it in" is not really his thing. He loves each of our kids so completely. He is constantly thinking of ways to get them the tools they are going to need to thrive.

I don't know why I am writing about him or us today, and it feels self-indulgent and a little weird. He puts other people first all of the time. He is impatient, but stuffs it down because that's what is best for the room. We've only been married 17 years, but they've been full and sometimes difficult. And mostly I want to acknowledge how good he is to us and for us and to me and for me. He doesn't have to be and he is. That's the crux of it, really-- all of us do not have to show up or be good or show kindness, but we can choose to do it and sometimes that is The Work we are asked to do. He is a quiet activist, moving through the world in genuine service to others, with no reciprocal expectation.

****

Today would have been Trayvon Martin's birthday. Many, many young, black men have lost their lives in protection of white fragility. But Trayvon and Tamir and others like them, loom large in my mind. Paul and I are letting our kids move out into the world without us. The voice of the oldest changed over night. My 9 year old is often mistaken for years older, in spite of his small stature. This is not a unique phenomenon. My 8 year old could take a grown man out if provoked. We practice mindfulness techniques and hug a lot. I wonder who will provoke him and I have waking nightmares over the consequences.

****

Black Boys Viewed as Older, Less Innocent Than Whites: “Children in most societies are considered to be in a distinct group with characteristics such as innocence and the need for protection. Our research found that black boys can be seen as responsible for their actions at an age when white boys still benefit from the assumption that children are essentially innocent"

The High Cost of Being Black in Multnomah County This should leave you in a puddle of rage. There is a neighborhood I walk through often and sometimes I choose to walk in the street because the sidewalk is so littered with phlegm and spit from people doing their marathon training/morning run/stroller jog. Can someone request a "spit sting" in this impeccably manicured neighborhood, I wonder?

"What is surprising is the unexpected, little-discussed daily experiences of black residents who are more likely to be slapped with violations for things that white people rarely even think of as violations.

Spitting in public? Black people were charged at 27 times the rate of white residents.

Failing to cross the street at a right angle? Fifteen times the rate of whites.

Jaywalking? Eight and a half times the rate of whites.

Walking in the road? Five and a half times the rate of whites.

Littering? Nearly four times the rate of whites."

Speaking of Protecting Whiteness: Please read about Carolyn Bryant. I think... I think it's hard to think of this as not anomalous. As in, she did this horrible thing, but it was a one-off thing. It's not though. It's not a one-off. White women and white men lie to cover their own sense of entitlement all of the time. I see it in my kids' schools, we see it on the bodycam footage of police officers, we see it at the highest offices of our country. And we pay for it in blood.